


We can't buy heaven so let's build a home

by orochisInebriation (asterCrash)



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Comfort Sex, Comfort/Angst, Polyamory, Post-Sburb, established alpha foursome, pretty dang fluffy, the alpha humans are much better, the alpha trolls were kind of dicks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-23
Updated: 2016-05-21
Packaged: 2018-06-03 23:00:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 12,287
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6630544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asterCrash/pseuds/orochisInebriation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the game, Horuss seeks solitude from his friends, he's over the drama and not over his ex-matesprit.</p><p>The Alpha kids decide to take the lonely horse troll for themselves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spockandawe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spockandawe/gifts).



It starts with Dirk.

You haven’t let anyone else inside your workshop since things with Rufioh didn’t work out, though strictly speaking it’s not like anyone else had use for the building. Dirk, it turns out, is the only other machinist out of the combined Beforan, Alternian and human universes and he had seemed distracted by his cohort of alpha players immediately after the game. You hardly blame him, you very much remember a time when it seemed like nothing else in life mattered nearly so much as the pile of interrelated emotional issues you called a social circle. That was back when you were alive, and then you were dead and somehow that only made the problem worse. Now you’re alive again and keen not to repeat mistakes. You’ve kept to yourself since the game finished, working on machines to help establish yourselves in the new world, working on pet projects, working for work’s sake at times. You’d quite convinced yourself that after you’d made everything the players could require of you, you would be free to travel the new world on your own, perhaps spending the rest of your days without having to worry about accidentally bumping into someone you know. You didn’t want to get integrated back into a social circle.

But it starts with Dirk.

He asks you, one morning as you were on your way from the house you’d claimed as your own to the makeshift workshop you’d set up, whether you would mind him doing some work of his own. You couldn’t think of a sufficient reason to turn him down, and it’s not like the workshop is small, so you agree as happily as you are able, though in truth forcing your smile has been harder of late. Dirk doesn’t force a smile, simply provides you with a taciturn nod and no expression to read further into. It is, quite frankly, a relief.

He works in companionable silence, sometimes on the other side of the room, sometimes right next to you, but he never feels like he’s inside of your personal space. This makes it all the more startling when his hand brushes yours reaching for the same tool. He doesn’t move his hand back immediately and neither do you, though you suspect yours is due more to confusion and his to curiosity. It may be his first time touching a troll, even if all he touched was the leather of your glove. You know it was your first time touching a human, even if he was wearing gloves also. His eyebrows stand out above his glasses, surprise, shock maybe, and he slowly pulls his hand back, as if he were trying not to spook you. You’re not sure how to feel about the delicacy. None of your friends had exactly been gentle with you, though that may come down to cultural differences between trollish culture and the pale human imitation. You don’t comment on it and neither does he, you each slowly return to your tasks, though you both notably leave the tool where it lies on the table, to the point that you actually develop an ingenious workaround on your current project simply to not have to use that specific tool. Indeed it seems like you could both go the rest of your immortal lives without ever acknowledging it, until Dirk makes the first move. It does, after all, start with Dirk.

“Sorry,” he murmurs, though you’ve been informed this is simply his nature. The alpha humans are, by reputation, as quiet as your friends were loud.

“I… am unaware of anything that requires an apology,” your voice creaks as you speak, you sound almost like Pyrope. It has been, you acknowledge, a fair while since you said anything significant.

“Well, partly I wanted to apologise for being all up in your personal space today, but also, I’m kind of sorry that this new universe doesn’t seem to be treating you so well. Some of us are a bit worried that you’ve come down with some kind of post-partum depression after helping us all start over again.” Of course your friends would gossip. It seems even if you’re gone from social events your ghost attends them without you, a notable absence to be commented on and spoken about as if you were there to listen. How very fitting for a member of your aspect. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have said anything,” Dirk’s murmur drops a little lower and he turns to focus on his task.

“It is not your fault,” you miss a good opportunity for a horse pun out of lack of practice.

“Foal-t,” Dirk corrects you. It feels like too obvious an olive branch to cling to, but you update your opinion of Dirk accordingly. He always did seem like the kind of man could appreciate the finer things in life.

You let the silence resume for a short while, returning to your respective tasks with a somewhat returned ease. You even dare to use the previously abandoned tool after a while. “What,” you start, without really thinking. “What are you working on?”

Dirk turns to you, deadpan expression, no forced smile and therefore nothing to give away the joke. “Robo smuppet.” He holds the creation up at eye level, next to his own face for comparison. The metal toy has a bulbous round end and a proboscis-like nose. At the press of some unseen button its eyes ignite red and the device begins to buzz and gyrate back and forth in Dirk’s hands. All the while he keeps his deadpan up, but you cannot resist the humour and a smile creeps up the corner of your mouth. Not the broad smile you use to show everyone that you’re okay and they don’t need to worry about you, the smile that happens when something unexpectedly humorous strikes you. Dirk doesn’t break from his pose for a few seconds, but you think you catch the very edge of his cheek dimpling slightly as he tries to conceal a smile.

It starts with Dirk, but it continues because you let it.

His presence in your workshop becomes a regular thing, not every day, not even most days, but often. He works on personal projects at first, but eventually you start asking for his help when you need an extra pair of hands, and even start consulting him when a problem has you stumped. Given he prefers colours you would associate with the warmer end of the hemospectrum you’re ashamed to admit that you initially overlooked his intelligence. Kankri would talk both your ears off if he found out, and you’ll take the continued absence of such a sermon to mean Dirk either didn’t notice your bias or is simply sympathetic enough to overlook it.

After a while, working on projects together leads to you talking often enough that it becomes natural for personal questions to come into the equation. It starts basically enough, enquiring as to your well being in the interest of ensuring you would be fit to work, but starts to veer dangerously into territory of how you are enjoying the new world and what life was like for you before. If it were only the former questions you would have been able to write it off as someone enquiring after you through Dirk; Meulin after your pale quadrant again, perhaps. If it had been only the latter questions you would have suspected one of your friends were trying to determine your opinion of them, likely Cronus, though potentially worse. Asking both sets of questions together though, gives you the somewhat unnerving impression that Dirk is simply enquiring on his own behalf, and wants to better get to understand you.

You try not to think about it too much.

Dirk is friends with almost everyone, but only his closest friends come visit him at your workshop. You’re grateful for that. They only ever come one at a time, they never stay for long and they never press you for conversation. You try to work up some kind of impression of the four of them as a unit, but it’s difficult. They’re made of the same fundamental pieces as you, but they were put together in a foreign country and all the manuals were chewed up by barkbeasts. 

Roxy is carelessly affectionate, touching Dirk everywhere at once and never with any greater kind of intent than just to touch him. She’s radiant and only ever seems to speak like she’s singing. She has, you consider, an even worse grasp of your shared aspect than you do, and you try to stay out of her path of noise and colour whenever she’s in the room. She’s not an unwelcome presence, strictly speaking, but she stirs up certain feelings that you had hoped not to have to deal with ever again and it’s simply easier not to hook yourself on her words, not to look out the corner of your eyes for a flash of her teeth, not to see if she’s growing her nails out.

Jake is her foil; where she touches Dirk without any kind of meaning Jake seems to put thought into every action he takes. He stands too small for the space he takes up, always partitioning himself to some corner of the shop where he thinks he will be least in the way. This invariably puts him in a position where he is most in the way, you eventually learn to simply guide him out of your path when you need to move through the space he currently occupies. He manages to make boisterous and quiet synonyms in a way you would never have considered possible and find quite refreshing; he has all the personality of a character as grand as Meenah Peixes, but he keeps it in an unobtrusive package that you don’t mind sharing a space with.

Jane is a category unto herself. Your initial few interactions with her led you to believe that she was some kind of human equivalent of a highblood, given the way almost all the humans act in amicable deference to her. You eventually learn that she is simply _nice_ in an extreme sense of the word. She tidies everything she touches and somehow never misplaces anything when doing so. That effect seems to include people; from what you can tell she acts as some kind of grand auspistice for her friends, and indeed her gossip with Dirk makes it sound like she fully intends to middle leaf for every member of your two races. The no-nonsense tone she uses almost makes you believe she could pull it off.

They become a very unobtrusive flavour to your life, each popping in once or twice a week while Dirk is working with you. Eventually, after being exposed to so much of their gossip, you start to enquire about them through Dirk. Never about the others, just the four you’ve deemed an acceptable part of your life at this time. Dirk provides whatever information you ask for; never holding anything back but often contextualising, since he understands human culture is quite different to your own. You come to find out Aranea is a d*rn liar, not only are the humans not restricted to only mating with the opposite gender to themselves, they do not appear to be limited to a single quadrant. From what Dirk explains, he, Jane, Jake and Roxy are all what you would describe as quadranted. Admittedly, they don’t divide their relationships up as neatly as Beforans did, but they can hardly be expected to on such an uncivilised world. Their relationship works out to be mostly red but with strong pitch overtones of good natured aggression and a deep base of pale affection that they apparently have no trouble sharing with each other. Dirk doesn’t seem fazed at all to tell you that they share a bed, thankfully not noticing that your goggles instantly fog up at such l00d imagery.

“I must say,” you volunteer during one of these conversation. “I am somewhat envious of such a stable relationship. To successfully rein in three matesprits,” you had decided matesprits was the closest applicable term, and Dirk had not objected. “It is quite a feat.”

“It’s easier when you’re working with good materials,” Dirk doesn’t look up from his work to talk to you anymore, casual enough that he doesn’t need to spare the attention trying to read your expression. “I, uh… I heard some of what went down in your session. No offense but I doubt anything good was going to come out of that; you shouldn’t beat yourself up for not doing better.”

Of course, Porrim must have shared the details. Or Latula. Or Damara. Or… You’re not going to say his name. Pointless to wonder how he knows, given that he now obviously does. “Would you not beat yourself up in my place?”

Dirk chuckles under his breath, not intending to hide it from you, but trying to be polite. Human social cues have become easier to read with more exposure to them. “Hell no,” his language causes you to sweat slightly, you hope he attributes it to the work you’re doing. “I’d keep blaming myself right until the end. Probably would be doing that now if I didn’t have Jane to set me straight whenever I get funked up about the way things went down in our session. Plus there’s the sex; huge tension reliever.”

You respond with your own laugh. “I didn’t realise human copulation was so different from trollish,” you jest back, but Dirk goes strangely quiet, turning to face you.

“Are you saying it isn’t nice for you? When we compared notes on the whole pailing thing it sounded like it was generally an enjoyable thing.”

“I think that’s quite possibly accurate, the other party certainly seemed to think so.” You worry that you’ve slipped up. That you’ve summoned back all the drama you were trying to _get away from_. That you’ve brought it into your safe space. That you’ve—

“But you didn’t.” Dirk’s hand is on your arm and you don’t know how it got there. He’s trembling, or he seems to be until you realise that he’s trying to steady you and _you_ are trembling. The emotion you don’t speak of grinds its way under your skin and threatens to make you into something you’re not. You breathe. You put on a smile. You answer Dirk.

“I did not, but I have come to believe that is simply the way of things for me.” Dirk is taken aback by your expression; you see the minutest amount of a frown above the bridge of his nose.

“Are you one of those ‘conscientious objectors’ Porrim was talking about? Like the guy in the red sweater?”

You laugh out loud at the thought and Dirk almost leaps back. Guilt rises up your throat like bile but you keep your smile in place. You need to end this conversation fast and go somewhere you won’t need to worry about anyone seeing you. “No. No, I think I am physically capable of enjoying c*pulation, it is simply that I am unlikely to meet a partner with whom that would be possible, given our somewhat reduced number of potential romantic partners. We can’t all be lucky enough to find three compatible souls after the end of the world.”

Dirk doesn’t have much of a reaction to that, for which you’re grateful. You didn’t mean to sound quite as envious as you are of the humans’ romantic accomplishments. You see him make the face that means he’s processing new information, seeing a puzzle for the first time. You sincerely hope he has no intention of fixing you. Some things are just broken. Some things it is better to throw out than to try to fix them.

“Huh,” he says.

It starts with Dirk.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a few days after Dirk successfully pried into your past when Jane finds you.

Dirk had returned to working in companionable, relative silence. It was just a coincidence that you didn’t need his help as much at that time and so you were talking less, though you had not ceased conversing entirely. Dirk’s matesprits as well, seem to have shorter visits, and their conversations are quieter; even Roxy manages to tone down the obnoxious parade of cheer she calls a personality. You are uncertain if this is some human form of deference, but you don’t kid yourself that Dirk has not told the others what he discovered of you. You try not to hold it against him, but find yourself taking your lunch away from the workshop, craving even more solitude than usual.

It’s on one such lunchbreak that Jane finds you. You’d found a clearing by a stream that was perfectly shaded by an overhanging tree not too far from your workshop and had been coming here with increasing frequency. It was, you thought, quite a serene location, and very different to the area you grew up in on Beforus. You always tread carefully through this landscape, making sure to place your feet only where you are certain you will do the least damage to the fresh new world beneath you. Jane doesn’t show such care when she walks, though in fairness flowers spring up in her footfalls so she can hardly be accused of damaging the scenery. Today you note daisies uncrumpling themselves to full attention in her wake, as if they had been there all along and Jane had simply been walking on a perfect path of pollen propagating pests.

She doesn’t ask if she can join you until she’s already seated, cross legged and mirroring your pose. At that point it would be rude to ask her to leave, and in truth she is not unwelcome. You simply incline your head in affirmation, and continue to sit silently, assuming she would eventually become bored and leave. You are, after all, a void player, doing nothing is in your nature. As a life player, and a maid at that, doing nothing should be her antithesis. You don’t expect her to last long.

This does make it surprising when she spends the next two hours in amicable silence next to you, not moving at all and breathing so quietly you can only tell she’s doing it if you watch the rising and falling of her breast. You find yourself doing so with increasing frequency, noting that her eyes are closed and her face is the picture of perfect serenity. The troll buddha could not have mimicked such a picture of composure, but you suppose she is a literal goddess.

“Thank you,” you volunteer when the silence begins to seem excessive.

Jane doesn’t look surprised, simply opens her eyes and turns to you. “For what?”

“For not asking,” you trust her to complete the sentence.

“Oh? Did I just spoil it by asking what you were thanking me for?” The wide smile tells you she’s only teasing, her rounded front fangs visible pressed against her lower lip. “It’s really none of our business, Dirk’s just a worrier.”

“He neighdn’t worry. I am fine.”

“That’s mostly what he’s worried about, but you’ve made it clear you’d rather not talk about it. This is quite a lovely spot, by the way.” Jane begins to pick daisies from the ground, though you are partly sure she is making them grow right up into her waiting hand.

“I’m… it’s good you think so,” you trip over your tongue, suddenly uncertain how to respond. Of all Dirk’s friends Jane is the most alien to you. A picture of composure, yet still able to express emotion without restraint. You could call her the Beforan ideal of a troll, but that in itself shows just how impossible to comprehend she truly is.

“I hope you don’t mind if I come here in the future.” She’s tying knots in the flower stems, linking them. “It would be nice if we could spend some time together.”

You find her unreadable. Alien enough that you have to push yourself to understand her expressions and her tone, she is still alien even among her cohort. Is this a pale solicitation? You regard her highly, but you’re not sure you could regard her in that capacity; you’re not sure you could regard _anyone_ in that capacity—

She moves smoothly to place a loop of the chained flowers on top of your head, neatly dropping them over your horns to settle without trouble. After placing the crown her hand slips down, just for a moment, to ghost over your cheek. The loudest hint of a caress. An act she must have known the significance of or why would she try it? She gives no clear guide as to her motives, simply smiling her toothy smile as she picks up a second crown to place it on her own head.

You both return to silence, though Jane no longer feels the need to close her eyes. You catch her glancing at you from time to time, and she catches you glancing back. You’re losing daylight to this, you know, but there’s something so inexplicably pleasant and relaxing. Your bloodpusher is doing well-timed flips in your thoracic cavity; not certain of what’s going on but happy to be involved, like an eager barkbeast lusus meeting her wiggler’s moirail for the first time.

“Well,” Jane says, breaking your concentration and making you immediately forget everything you wanted to say to her. “I should get going.” She reaches over and squeezes your hand, unthinkingly affectionate in that way you see her with her human friends. Her human matesprits. “This was fun.” She leans into your personal space and you’re not thinking nearly quickly enough to back away so it’s all you can do to not move from where you are. Her lips press into yours and you barely process it there’s so much sensation. She’s warm, like sun-soaked rocks, and softer than a recuperacoon filled with honkbeast feathers and then she’s departing. Standing up to walk away, each footprint behind her a bloom of daisies.

You stay outside until the sun goes down on this strange new planet you’ve found yourself on.


	3. Chapter 3

After your first afternoon with Jane, you start finding more projects to work on that require Dirk’s assistance. The two of you chat; you even start exchanging words with his friends when they come to visit you during the day. You learn that Jane is assisting in figuring out sustainable crops that won’t need constant magical upkeep and Jake has been charting out the local topography to see if it might be worth expanding your little settlement. You’re still wary of Roxy, though she seems emboldened enough by your tolerance to press your buttons: loudly declaring her presence when she walks through the door, making a show of being carelessly affectionate, and one particular incident in which she pointed out an obvious solution to a problem you’d been stuck on for a week. You needed a very cold shower after that one.

Jake, by comparison, is much better company and you make a show of doting on him whenever he’s around in the hopes he will become an example for Roxy to follow. Some days Jake even comes just to speak to you, regaling you with the tale of his recent adventure in which he thought he saw a horse but promptly fell out of a tree. Jake English’s stories take some getting used to, but you appreciate the contextual puzzle he presents you with each time and listen as intently as you can. You think the way you passively appreciate his narratives might be more familiar to him than the more active way his friends tend to engage with the stories. He reminds you of yourself, largely: a creature built for solitude and forced into a suddenly very crowded world. 

There’s an earnestness to him that you think might be the rarest commodity on your new world. You never met a troll who could say exactly what was in their thinkpan and make everyone feel better for it, not the way that Jake does so easily and so frequently. You can see exactly why his matesprits love him, in a way that you acknowledge is not entirely academic. You see the way Jane plays with his hair, the way Dirk _smiles_ for him. Roxy peppers him with with kisses constantly, surprising him from behind, with hands in inappropriate places. It’s raunchy, but as far as Roxy goes it’s understandable.

As he exhausts his supply of recent stories to tell you of, Jake starts to talk more about his past. Growing up with his grandmother at first and then growing up largely alone. He talks about his quadrant troubles with Jane and Dirk, and then his disastrous attempted matespritship/moirallegiance with Dirk alone. He makes sure to clarify that things are much, much better now (further cementing your belief that Jane Crocker was hatched to be a middle leaf) but he still seems to bear some of the emotional scars from that time. You can see it in the way he sometimes itches to leave a conversation, the way his mouth snaps shut if Dirk or one of the girls interrupts him. You don’t know how to help him with that. You’re frankly still in the process of not processing your own breakup. You can’t imagine how much more complicated that would be if you were still with… You still won’t say his name.

Jake starts to take lunch with you in the shaded meadow you and Jane sometimes meet in. His is a noisy kind of silence, but strangely you find you don’t mind. He has a kind of non-presence that makes him easy company. It’s the day that Jake doesn’t talk that really takes up your attention.

It begins like any other lunch time, Jake tromping in to settle beside you. You can’t describe his gait any other way, but you’ve noticed no flower is ever crushed by his footfalls. He doesn’t, however, call out his normal greeting, and sits much closer to you than usual. You are about to break your own silence to enquire as to his health when he catapults his head into your lap, without warning or request. You try to process what’s going on, not daring to move from your current position with him lying on top of you like this. You very selfishly hope that none of your acquaintances sees you in this position; you don’t know if you’re in the mood for a lecture on inappropriate quadranted actions with members of other species from Kankri, or yet another stern talking to from Aranea about how delicate these humans are, and how dangerous it would be for you to be involved with them in any quadrant given your unusual strength.

Very, very slowly -and as gentle as you can possibly be, even with your gloves- you rest a hand on his head and stroke smoothly over his hair, like you are handling the world’s most fragile musclebeast. You panic that even that might have been too rough when he starts to shake under you, but it becomes apparent when you stop that he is in fact simply crying. You clamp down on instincts that scream at you to embrace him; what you want and what he needs are clearly very different things and you will most certainly not do anything to make him uncomfortable. Maybe this isn’t even pale by human standards, maybe this is a thing they do with all their friends.

“I’m awful sorry for this Horuss,” he says between sobs, muffled where his face is pressed into the leather of your jacket. “I just—” he sniffles “I just didn’t want the others to see me like this.”

You understand this feeling far too much. The burden of being around people it feels like you spent an eternity with, feeling weak and not wanting them to know. Not because you were afraid they’d be anything less than supportive, in truth it was the opposite; you simply couldn’t stand the thought of being culled by the people you trusted the most to see you as an equal, rather than just another victim. 

You move your hand around to Jake’s cheek. It’s scandalous, to be certain, but he needs you and these bright, flaring human emotions demand care. You don’t give him a proper papping, you don’t trust your self-control enough for that, but you hold his cheek there and very delicately brush away a tear. You say nothing, because between a man such as him and a troll such as you, nothing needs to be said. You just hold him, through the afternoon and into the night until Jake English, lying in your lap with his face in your hand, starts to talk again.


	4. Chapter 4

You know it is inevitable, but you try to hold back anyway.

Roxy’s aggressive presence in your world has long since exceeded the point where you could pretend she didn’t know what she was doing. For a human, she is a natural at caliginous romance and even more of a natural flirt. Not only does she not restrain herself from draping her body over Jane and Jake and Dirk whenever you’re in the room, she has somehow seen fit to “assist” you in your latest three projects. Assistance here meaning noisily buzzing around your workshop, routinely piping up to either advise you of her latest thoughts regarding her biological processes (as if you need to know when she is hungry or when she is tired or when she needs to use the load gaper) or to point out, with increasing accuracy, the exact solution you had been missing in every endeavour you set out towards. It seems she sees exactly what you do not see; that she has become oil to your water, the day to your night, the cavalreaper to your musclebeast. Under such constant strain, a confrontation is clearly unavoidable, but it’s still disappointing when you return to your workshop one afternoon to find her pailing Dirk on your table.

Her shirt is off, and you can sees magnificent sweat rolling down her every curve and contour. Bite marks show up bright red on the pink-tinged human skin she shares with Dirk. Scratches are evident down her arms. She moans, loud as ever, and grinds herself down onto his thigh, with one of her legs parting his. Her hands have his pinned down above his head, and you see him helplessly gasping underneath her as she grinds hard yet again, before leaning down to capture his mouth in a deep kiss. Even from your vantage point across the room you can see there is far too much tongue involved. You watch in breathless agony as she bends her neck further down to bite hard on his collarbone, to his writhing pleasure against her. It’s only then that she looks up to meet your gaze, and grins that awful, awful grin of hers that pulls you in like a black hole.

“Like what you see, horse-face?”

You have to leave your workshop in a hurry, desperately in need of some distance from her suffocating presence, the sharp scent of licorice that fills your nostrils whenever she looks at you now overpowering all reason. Roxy, however, decides that what you needed was not so much fresh air as it is to “—get the fuck back here, Horuss. You know you can’t keep ignoring the—” you try to tune her out, you really do, but something in your thinkpan just wants to hang on her every word, obsesses over everything she mispronounces because her and her hatchmate were raised on books more than any kind of spoken language.

“Horuss, can you at least try looking at me when I’m talking to you?”

“No,” you reply, with your back to her.

“Try~it,” she insists, in her most grating high-pitched sing-song voice.

“No,” you say again, quieter this time.

She grabs you by the shoulder, pulling you around to face her and you react unthinkingly. To your eternal shame, after weeks of her presence in your life, drilling down on you all the time but never daring to touch you, after she has finally crossed that threshold, you shove her away from you.

You worry for a very long second that you might have shoved her hard enough that your hands went clean through her, the horror only partially abating when you realise she can make herself intangible and your shove had about as much effect as a stern glare directed at a blind woman. She grins that fierce and frankly amazing grin of hers and socks you right in the face.

You update your assessment; Roxy Lalonde is indeed STRONG enough to throw you.

Her punch carries you rolling down the hill as you struggle to stop yourself. You end up flat on your back with nary the length of a hopbeast between yourself and the gently flowing river. Roxy is on you in instant; the breath going out of you as she plants herself firmly, pinning down your arms and legs and settling her weight right where you don’t want it, on your rapidly dilating sheath. She either knows nothing about black romance and has no idea what she is doing to you, or she knows everything about black romance and that would be _awful_. You panic, trying desperately to keep yourself from struggling, keep your strength in check, trying not to move, not to move an inch—

She kisses you then, deeply and without reservation and with no understanding of how hard it is for you to not kiss her back. Your panic deepens because you don’t know how to make her stop and you don’t know how to want her to stop. She wouldn’t understand if you told her; these humans are so free with their affection they couldn’t understand what it’s like to be told a thousand times that you are simply not allowed to feel a certain way for other people because you could _hurt_ them. And you don’t want her to be hurt. You want to roll on the ground with her like the other trolls do and bite her lips and tell her she’s just the worst and you hate her so much but you’re not allowed to hate. You don’t want to hurt her.

She pulls back and you fix your smile in place. “Please never do that again,” you tell her like you mean it, keeping your tone as neutral as you’re able to.

She looks are you with this look that might be confusion and might be horror and you hope to all the horses in this new world you made is not _pity_. “Call me garbage,” she says, not moving from her position on top of you.

“What?”

“Call me an awful pile of horsepoop or stinky alien trash or something,” her brow is creased, like she’s staring at a puzzle with one piece definitely missing. “I know you want to.”

“I canter be what you want me to be. It does not behoof a troll of my standing to give in to such emotions.”

“I know that’s bullshit, because if you really didn’t want this you wouldn’t be doing the horse puns. I see you day in, day out, holding yourself back from what you really want because you’re too cluckbeastshit to just take it. And you know what, Horuss? I really loathe your stupid horse-loving butt. I just thought maybe you’d be brave enough to admit you feel the same way.”

You feel your bloodpusher trying to tear your chest apart. Seeing no other option, you do your best to be gentle as you try to lift Roxy off of you.

It doesn’t work. 

She holds you down. 

Somehow, the meagre amount of STRENGTH applied was insufficient to move her. You try again, with slightly more force, to no effect. Above you, Roxy leers. You stop trying to hold yourself back and actually push up against her. She doesn’t move an inch. You strain and struggle but somehow, in some impossible way, all of your strength is as nothing to her. She giggles as you actually try your hardest to lift her and find yourself unable to move her at all.

“Void powers, bro. Maybe if you’d spent a little more time getting your chakras blitzed by a certain hot and hateable babe and less time working on your nerdy dweeb projects, you’d know how to do it too. Now what do you say? Hate me?” She makes a kissy face at you and winks, she fucking winks.

“I hate you,” you whisper, so quiet you can barely hear it yourself.

“What’s that? You’re going to have to speak up,” she won’t stop giggling, like the kind of awful troll who gets too distracted laughing at their joke to actually finish it. Just like in the movies.

“I hate you,” you say at a perfectly audible volume this time, even though she’s only inches away from your face.

“Awww, you’re gonna have to be a little louder than _that_. At the moment you just sound like a whinny loser,” she won’t stop smiling and it’s just the most real and genuine thing you’ve ever seen and it feels like a personal mockery. You want to touch her everywhere. You want her to touch you. She stirs feelings in you that you’ve spent your whole life holding back and now she just expects you to let yourself feel them without any sort of hesitation or thought? The only thing more aggravating than her expectations is the way you seem to be living up to them.

“You are the most contemptible, overnoisy, contrarian, needlessly informal, confusing, arrogant, frustrating alien piece of human garbage I have ever or will ever meet and I am so pitch for you it hurts!”

She kisses you again, and this time you don’t hold back at all. You move and turn with her, savouring the ability to kiss and touch and hold someone without treating them like fragile glass waiting to crumble in your fingers. She moans and giggles and whines and _refuses_ to be quiet and dignified about this amazing thing that you are doing together.

It is the best kiss of your entire life to date and Roxy cuts it off after ten seconds.

“If you want more like that, come to my room in an hour’s time. If you’re not too cluckbeast, that is.” She leaves you hanging with those words, leaves you lying on the grass as she gets up and walks away. You feel spent and you haven’t even started yet. Your bulge is insistent inside you, begging for freedom, begging for the release you know your kismesis can offer you.

“Bye, idiot!” You shout out weakly at her retreating form.


	5. Chapter 5

You arrive, at the stated time and not a second later, and the hatred is still boiling pleasantly within you. You’ve never felt this way about anyone before. It may be cliche, but it’s true. She’s such a smug, self-righteous, _demanding_ , arrogant little so and so. You hate her beyond all the years of fearing that hate was a thing you could not allow yourself. She pries apart all your self-imposed boundaries and cracks you open, right down the middle. You feel silly now for trying to fight it for so long, you’ve hated her almost as long as you’ve known her and now, after so much needless struggling, she wants to share that hate with you. A thousand tiny musclebeasts gallop across the inside of your gastric sack as you reach for the door handle.

Roxy is inside, of course, seated in some kind of rigid human pile, like a throne but made of pillows. She’s leering at you, and your pumpbiscuit flutters at the instant shock of aniseed in the back of your throat. Not breaking eye contact she bends forward and presses a long kiss into the woman pooled across her thighs. Jane. Jane who is so sweet and so calming and whom you are so, so red for. Jane is partially disrobed, Roxy’s hands roughly groping her human rumblespheres, plainly visible under her shirt. You can see her shudder as Roxy’s thumb brushes over the dark brown tip of it, the way her legs squeeze together as they lounge on the raised side of their pile. You get it now. Roxy brought you here to show you what you couldn’t have, to point out you don’t belong with her friends. To drive you away. It all makes sense, humans don’t really understand black romance, of course they don’t. She just needed bait to bring you along and handily remind you that you will never in all the sweeps of your life feel like you belong with—

A warm presence comes up behind you, an arm snakes around your waist and holds you tight.

“Hey,” says Dirk’s voice, from somewhere over your shoulder. “You look pretty awkward standing in the door there, how about you come inside?”

You turn to look over your shoulder, Dirk is there, holding on to you, and you try to go rigid to make sure that you don’t accidentally hurt him if you push him off. Jake is with him, smiling wide and giving you a wink. You allow yourself to be pushed and dragged, trying to go limp as they bring you inside the warm dark of Roxy’s room. You see a longer version of the rigid pile Roxy is sitting on, and a floor covered with soft blankets, the kind humans sleep under. Jake closes the door as he comes in and then it’s just yourself and the four humans who don’t seem to want you to leave.

“I hay-ve to admit some confusion,” you stammer. “I don’t know why you’ve brought me here.”

“It was Roxy’s idea, actually,” Dirk begins, though the bitch herself waves at you from the pile she and Jane still occupy. “After we first got here and everyone settled, she noticed you were pretty much the only person who was going off on their own on the regular. Hell, even the Makaras were being more sociable.”

“And I thought to myself,” Roxy interrupts, because of course she does. “Wow, who does this fuckass think he is that he doesn’t want to party it up with the rest of us?”

“Ignore her,” Jane silences Roxy with two fingers between her teeth, holding her jaw open and giving you a tantalising glance at her tiny human fangs. You swallow deeply.

“So anyway, Roxy told me to spend some time with you, find out what your deal was,” it explains Dirk’s presence in your workshop, though you’re a little surprised to find Roxy was the architect of it all. “After finding out about your quadrant troubles, namely that you seem to have gotten the shittiest possible draw when it came to your red stuff and Aranea’s juvenile attempts at blackflirting, Jane suggested that maybe we could use some of our godly abilities of seduction to cheer you up a bit.”

You don’t really get time to process any of that because Jane is on her feet and moving towards you. She hasn’t bothered to cover herself up at all and you are in grave danger of learning a whole lot about human anatomy if her dress falls any further off her shoulder. Roxy too, is coming towards you, draping herself over Dirk like the possessive over-friendly hussie she is and you want to kiss her face until you’re both too exhausted to smile.

“It’s not that we were fibbing about liking you,” Jake slings a friendly arm over your shoulder. “Roxy just gave us an extra nudge in the right direction. You’re a stand-up sort of feller, Horuss, I hope you don’t feel too hard done by. I tried my best to pull of an impression of red trollmance for you.”

You turn to face him, puzzled. “You were trying for red?” Dirk snorts and Jane covers up a smile with her hand.

“Sorry, Jakey,” Roxy leans over from Dirk to pat his hair. “You’re pretty much palebait to the bone, ain’t no troll doesn’t want you in their diamond. Half the humans, too.” Jake sputters indignation at her insinuation, though he uses what you understand are considered archaic human vulgarities to do so.

The laughter dies down eventually, but there are fond smiles all round. You don’t smile, because for the first time in a long time you don’t feel like you need to cover up whatever your face is doing. These four have invited you here, in their own roundabout way, and you’ll be damned if you intend to be any kind of dishonest with them. You want this. You want them. All of them. “So,” you eventually speak, unprompted. “How does this work? What do I— What do you want me to do?”

“Well,” Jane begins. “Roxy and I already received our quadrant related kiss, and I understand you and Jake had your little moment of intimacy,” more sputtering from Jake. “So how about a smooch for your handsome middle leaf over there? Did I use that term correctly, ‘middle leaf’?”

“Oh hell no,” Dirk approaches you as he speaks, and you do your best to go slack as he winds his arm around your waist. “Those other chumps can play at trollmance all they want, but I’m a simple kind of dude. Horuss, if it ain’t too forward of me,” his drawl is intoxicating. “I’d like to show you how a human kisses his alien boyfriend.”

A very long time ago, you received your first kiss from Rufioh Nitram. He told you that you were a good kisser, before asking that you not tell anyone. Damara still held his red quadrant at the time, and he wasn’t ready to break up with her. Lovesick fool that you were, so easily swayed by a pretty smile and a nice haircut, you agreed. For a very long time after, that was the best kiss you had ever received, and you were very certain that you would never receive another like it.

When Jane kissed you, you felt sweetness and caring that Rufioh had never inspired in you. When Roxy kissed you, you drank deep of the well of black romance you’d thought would be forever denied you.

When Dirk Strider kisses you, you receive everything you wanted Rufioh to give you, and everything he never gave.

It is the best kiss you have ever had in your life, in your death and in your reborn existence.

Dirks lips are unbelievably soft, softer even than Jane’s, and his hands are rough with callouses exceeding your own. He holds the back of your neck like he need to keep you in place for him, the hand that lies unmoving on your hip somehow intimately possessive. You can’t focus on anything else in the room, can’t focus on anything but the way his mouth moves so beautifully against your own. You’d say it was like magic, if magic wasn’t fake as shit, so instead you say it’s like automation. Like thousands of mechanical hooves, striking a beat for the bloodpusher trapped inside you, forced into overtime by the undeniable need that eats up through you, that makes you kiss him back. You feel him smirk, feel the exhale of his breath and you know it’s because he knows that you’re giving yourself to him. And he knows that you know that he knows. And he likes that.

If it were only this, if this was all you were ever going to have, it would be more than enough, and you would weep tears of joy for the bounty you’d received. Instead, you feel an arm coil around your middle, from behind. Warmth presses into your back, and you know without thinking that it’s Jake. He rubs the soft flesh of your thorax and you know he means it in a red way but it’s pale ecstasy on top of the flush of your kiss with Dirk. You consider the transgression of his involvement. Kankri’s voice, comes unbidden to your mind, as does Aranea’s, lecturing you in an awful tandem about the inappropriateness of quadrant blurring. “But, like,” Roxy’s voice intrudes on your monologue, somehow, “fuck those guys.” Your imaginary Roxy has a point. Jake’s a g*sh-d*rned alien. Even if quadrant blurring somehow still applied, you’d like to think technical beastiality is something of an overriding concern. Heh. Over-riding. That was a good one. Jake’s lips press into the skin of your neck, just above your collar. You moan hard into Dirk’s mouth at the extra attention and resolve, as far as inner diatribes go, not to give a sho*t.

A warm mouth closes on the other side of your neck, Jane’s, with just the hint of teeth nicking at your skin. One hand cups your rear, while another skillfully starts undoing the buttons of your jacket. You’re a little surprised you’re able to focus so well on all the little events happening to you, as Dirk’s lips have not yet ceased their motions against your own, nor has Jake stopped lightly petting of your front. You’re the most pleasant kind of overloaded, and somehow it renders all the important motions crystal clear while everything else fades away. So when Jane whispers how much she wants you against the nape of your neck, before biting deeply, you don’t miss a second of it, nor the resulting moan through her teeth, or the way she shudders against you when you moan for her.

“Okay, yeah this is going too slow for my liking,” you don’t really process what Roxy says before you feel yourself grow intangible in the hands of the others. Their lips suddenly sink in just a little too far and their hands don’t quite hold you anymore. Then Roxy tackles you. The two of you, touching only each other, crash down onto the blankets covering the floor, your tangibility restored just in time to hit the ground firmly. Roxy is straddling you, thighs squeezing around your middle, and a quick flex confirms that she’s stolen your strength again, you’re unable to remove her.

Not that you’d want to.

You lift up to meet her, unafraid of what you might do because you’re already doing something that would have been beyond your imagining before this impossibly perfect moment. Her mouth tastes awful, like she’s coated every surface in some kind of antiseptic liquid; it didn’t taste this way before so obviously, at some point in the last half hour, she has made a point of scrubbing her mouth with this stuff just to piss you off. It’s endearingly despicable and you milk the awful, awful taste of it for all it’s worth. She laughs that grating laugh against you and for all the world you couldn’t care that there are three other people watching you right now. You can’t see any of them past Roxy taking up your whole field of vision, but you hear them cheering you on.

“Guys, come on, get in on the action, I need some backup here.”

Jake crashes down next to you, stretched out, a picture of composure. Dirk follows, on top of him instantly and making playful growls at his matesprits throat. The two make a mockery of struggling for dominance while Roxy works her way down your front, unbuttoning your jacket as she goes to expose your thorax to the musky heat of her lair. For a few seconds she acts as if she’s completely forgotten what she’s doing, trailing her fingers lightly over your skin without a hint of her nails, pressing moist kisses along your ribs as if this was some kind of pale/flushed vacillation rather than pitch as the stygian void of a seadweller’s plumbing. It’s a relief when she gives up her act to bite you, hard, just below the soft flesh of your rumblesphere, and rakes the other side of your thorax with her nails. She has evidently been sharpening them, a line of noble indigo coats her nails and you can see the marks left by their trails over you. You don’t make crass noises for her, but you can’t hold yourself back from drawing a less than subtle, shuddering breath as she tries her nails out on you further, making an artwork of blue lines across your body. She works her way down to the buckle of your trousers and you almost stop her on principle but this is going far too well for you to even think about fighting back.

“Boys, don’t get too distracted with each other, this was meant to be about Horuss,” Jane chastises playfully and begins to disrobe as she walks around. She’s so casual with her body, the reveal of gorgeous brown skin such a non-event for her as she strides across the room. She must know that this is the first time you’ve ever seen a human naked and yet it doesn’t occur to her that this could easily be the most beautiful thing you’ve ever witnessed. Roxy nips at your skin with her teeth, trying to draw your attention back down to her, you pay Jane even more attention to spite her. Her curves are supple, like nothing on Beforus, nothing in the world of harsh imperial standards and the ready culling of any who didn’t meet them. A single droplet of sweat, clear in that strange human way, curls its way down to disappear in the meeting of her rumblespheres. You swallow deeply, and she notices, smiles at you.

“Janey, how about you keep his face busy while I do my thing down here,” Roxy pipes up from your waist, pulling your pants down and off your hips in one quick jerk without bothering to consult you as to whether you’d like to be pantsless right now or not.

“Your thing?” Jane descends on you, sinking to her knees on either side of your head, filling up your world as she kneels on your arms, holding you down in place. It’s such beautiful flushed/pale symbolism you half believe it was stolen from one of Kankri’s more problematic romance novels, the heat of her right up against your face, yet holding you down, keeping you still.

“Yep, my thing.” She draws her fingers along the seams of your undergarments, as if testing them for faults, before drawing a line of enticing pressure with her thumb between your hips. You lift up to her touch and she presses you back down with a firm hand on your thigh.

“I’m afraid I’m not terribly clear on which thing you mean, dear.” With Jane taking up your full field of vision, the experience of Roxy is reduced to just her touch and the sound of her breathing.

“You know, that thing that I do.” And of course her incessant chattering. “With my tongue.”

“Oh, that thing,” Jane sinks a little closer to your face, the arrangement of folding skin between her legs is even more alien than you’d expected and you’re a little uncertain where to start. “Horuss, I think you’re going to want to let Roxy do this thing to you.” Out of the corner of your eye you see Jake lying next to you, thrusting upwards off the ground. Dirk is nowhere you can see. Roxy’s tongue runs long and flat over your sheathe and you suddenly have a pretty good idea of where Dirk is.

Jane is staring down at you and nibbling her lower lip, there’s red human blood in her cheeks and she looks like a thing worth worshipping. You suppose she is a goddess after all. Roxy licks you again, over the entrance of your nook this time, reminds you what you’re here to do. Tentatively, and very mindful of your fangs, you let your tongue out to taste a stripe up the seam where her folds meet. You hadn’t known what to expect, but she tastes of glorious sweat and something sour, like the aftertaste of Kurloz’s wicked elixir. You taste her again, more enthusiastically, and she coos above you in satisfaction. You put any thoughts of stopping this any time soon far out of your mind.

You try to mimic the actions Roxy performs on you as she goes, though sometimes keeping track of what exactly she’s doing down there becomes impossible through the sensations she thrusts upon you. She swirls her tongue in circles above your sheathe, teasing the tip of your bulge out, and when you probe Jane in a similar area you find that humans aren’t entirely devoid of a bulge, they seem to have a little vestigial nub of flesh above the entrance you think passes for their nook. Though you hardly have time to consider it with all that’s going on, it strikes you as odd, because you’ve definitely heard Dirk jokingly brag about how large his bulge is.

“Has she done the thing yet?” Jane asks, as if you didn’t have a mouth quite occupied answering her in a different way. “It doesn’t feel like she’s done the thing yet,” she rocks herself forward on you, in a way you can’t quite describe but feels very much like she’s trying not to move but is being compelled somehow to move back and forth over your lips. You don’t know exactly what thing Roxy’s supposed to be doing to you, whether she’s done it already or not. Perhaps it’s simply not as pleasurable for a troll, or perhaps you’re simply not the kind of troll given to that sort of pleasure, perhaps—

Roxy does the thing with her tongue and you very, _very_ suddenly find yourself completely unsheathed. There simply isn’t enough self-control in the world to hold back the groan that shivers up your whole body and your tongue is rewarded with more of Jane for it. Jake hums a happy tune next to you, you wonder if that’s his hand brushing up your ribs. Dirk’s grip on your thigh is unmistakeable, the reassuring squeeze, those soft, calloused human fingers. Roxy’s pinch, too, is very distinctive because seriously who would pinch someone at a time like this? Everything is perfect so of course she’s being a brat about it.

It wouldn’t be perfect if she wasn’t.

Roxy’s fingers curl up into your nook and it’s obvious now she’s been with a troll before. How else would she know to move her fingers like that? To stroke the squishy sensitive spot you can feel through your nook in the base of your bulge, play it like a violin, like she’d done just this for every night of her life in preparation for making you feel completely inadequate in terms of your comparative knowledge of human anatomy. It burns you to know how prepared she is for this, when you’d be completely lost in her position, only able to resort to the pleasurable motions you’d found exploring your own body. You do your best to explore Jane with your tongue, hoping that when the time comes to deal with Roxy you’ll have at least mastered the basics of human genital pleasures. Jane makes the most delicious noises with everything you do, ever helpful, ever godly above you. You draw the point of your tongue around the entrance of her not-quite-nook, feeling her shift from side to side where she still has your arms pinned down, as if her body wants to draw her away from where you touch her but she commands herself further down onto you. She whines so sweetly when you abandon her nook in favour of her bulge

“Hey Horuss,” Roxy wouldn’t have to speak up for you to hear her, but she clearly wants everyone in the room to know she’s the centre of attention. “This part of you,” she gives your bulge a squeeze, “can I have it?”

_Certainly not_ , Jane’s humanity muffles you as you try to reply, she giggles and writhes on you.

“I mean it’s in void colours, so I presume it belongs to me, that means I can do whatever with it right?”

Jane grinds down hard on your tongue, choking out any response. You try to tell her no, in a way that you don’t particularly mean.

“What’s that? It sounds like you’re trying to say this void-coloured troll-tentacle doesn’t belong to me?”

_Yes,_ you moan into Jane, the vibrations of your throat clearly affecting her as she starts to whine, high pitched and needy. Roxy thumbs over your tip and you see stars.

“Well, if you say so, it really doesn’t belong to me.” You take breath to answer her, even through the slick folds of Jane above you, but Roxy interrupts, “I guess then, as a wily rogue, I’m-a have to steal it.” She takes the length of you into her mouth before you have time to react. The breath you took gets punched right out of you as you feel her tongue moving along you, as you slide into her, heedless of her teeth.

Jane bucks, grabbing your hair and pulling you up into her, still doing that weird mammalian rocking back and forth. Your face is pressed into her sweaty warmth and you don’t even have to try to savour it, your entire experience of the world coalesces into the feel and taste of Jane’s skin against your mouth, and the unbearable warmth of Roxy’s mouth around you. Jane is loud, louder even than Roxy as she calls your name and curses foul profanity unbecoming of one as sacred of her. She begs, as if she need do anything more than command, and she pleads you continue, as if you had any intention of stopping.

Roxy sucks (and those two words alone would be a complete sentence and very definitely a true fact), she sucks you down deep into her mouth and she might as well be eating the entirety of you for all you can feel. Her fingers still haven’t left your nook, scissoring apart inside you (who told her to do that? You didn’t know it was something any other trolls actually enjoyed), as she gorges on your bulge. You feel some of your genetic material release in her, not a full release, but enough that she has to swallow and that prevents any other kind of thought for several seconds and the sensation overwhelms you. If she notices, she can’t say, but she does it again, and again, and again, and again, and you’re crying, weeping tears of abject hatred and happiness that your kismesis, this spade from hell is ripping you open and drinking your insides and making you feel more alive that you ever have before in your life. You try to say something, you try to express just how badly you need this all and you pour it all into Jane, into her bulge and her nook and her lips and her weird mammalian fur and her gorgeous sweat-slicked skin. It seems Jane must feel at least a tenth of what you are feeling now, the way she loses control of her muscles, the way she presses you firmly into her scent, the way she keens for you.

You’re not sure if there’s a human word for the way she reacts, not sure if you’re just applying trollish standards to things that have no equivalent, but if Jane were a troll, you’d say she has an orgasm.

Roxy lets you go to laugh at the way Jane collapses off to the side of you, rolling around on the human pile like a meowbeast in the sun. Dirk has something white staining his chin, you figure you’re probably similarly decorated at this point, and Jake looks somehow even more relaxed than usual. The two of them shift up above your head, Dirk taking Jane’s position in pinning down your hands and Jake running his fingers through your hair, easing away the soreness where Jane had tugged on you just a little too hard.

“Okay, yes, good, you guys are on board. It’s still my turn, right?” You’re a little too exhausted to protest that nobody is having turns with you; Roxy crawls up your body unhindered. She’s disrobed entirely, you note distantly.

“Go easy on the poor lad, Roxy,” Jake speaks up in your defence, your champion, your diamond. “He looks more than a little worn out after the going over Jane gave him.”

“I’m good for another round if Horuss needs a break,” Dirk volunteers.

“You don’t get it,” Roxy sounds frustrated and if she’s frustrated with you then _good_. “I have waited _months_ for a piece of this action. Come on, his alien dick in my hoo ha, let’s make it happen.”

“Please don’t call it that,” Jane pipes up from the ground, though she doesn’t seem to get any further involved.

“I’ll call it what I like, thank you very much Ms. Crocker. My hoo ha, my bald taco, my danger clam—”

“Please stop,” you croak from the ground.

Roxy pauses at that, bites her lip. “For serious, horse boy? Say red and we’ll stop but I was intending to ride this pony off into the sunset if you know what I mean.”

“Up yo*rs,”

“That’s a yes, isn’t it?” Roxy speaks with a leer, appraising you like so much meat. A troll-sized nookworm and all hers to play with.

“Fl*p yes it is,”

It’s Jake’s hand on your bulge that guides you into her, and Dirk’s hand caressing your mouth, Jane’s fingers rifling through your hair. Roxy is hot and wet, like her mouth but even moreso. She burns around you and you burn within her. You’re joined, a tangled, snarled, frustrating line of black thread coiling around your throats and all your fingers and binding you two together. Serendippity. You hate her, though hating at all is still new to you, you hate her so much you want to blackout suns. You want the cold void of your mutual loathing to swallow the cosmos right back into non-existence. You want everything to be consume as her nook consumes you.

She heaves and shudders and presses down on you hard. Somehow, in some perfect way, her complete disregard for your mutual pleasure as she drives up and down on the length of your bulge is the most sensual aspect of the entire experience. Lightning plays across your gastric sac as she rubs up and down, your bulge unable to coil and grasp and hold at any part of her, sliding slickly in and out of her, wet with your mutual arousal. Her hands are on your throat and it feels like the world around you has stopped existing, like you’ve found yourselves one last perfect dream bubble where the only thing in existence is the two of you and the scream of sensation drowning out all else. She squeezes tight but even that’s not enough, with her whole weight down on you she can’t make you really feel it. She bites your lip and pulls back as if to tear it off your mouth, you still feel Dirk on your hands and Jake’s fingers in your hair, but you can’t be aware of them as anything other than immovable obstacles preventing you from fighting back as Roxy chokes you as hard as she can. You hips strain and thrust up in time with Roxy, trying to stay connected, trying to stay deep enough within her to give yourself enough to get off on. You feel your breath go short, and though she’s holding your throat tight enough to bruise you know Roxy’s not strong enough on her own to close your airway completely. It occurs to you then that she is literally taking your breath away, you can barely see past the sensation but two pinpricks of dark blue light where her eyes should be stare down into your throat and siphon all your air out of existence. You try to gasp, but with your throat constricted you can only choke. You feel yourself coming close to your limit, feel your bulge stiffening in segments as it prepares to pail again. Your vision grows dark around the edges and Roxy howls in pleasure above you. You can’t breathe. You feel amazing.

Someone very, very distant from you shouts out “Roxy, _no_ ,” but you couldn’t say who.

 

* * *

 

 

You come back to the world in pieces, the first thing you perceive is the stickiness of your own givings on the skin of your thorax and between your thighs. The pressure of Roxy on top of you is gone, as is the force of void limiting your strength. Ironically, you can recognise its presence now that it is no longer affecting you. The next thing that returns is your hearing, though it’s still too faint to discern voices you hear hushed anxious whispers above you. Your head, from its angle, is on something, something soft and warm. Your vision begins to resolve out of nothingness and looking up you can see the humans surrounding you. Jane is directly above you, with a hand still in your hair, stroking back through your curls.

“Hey,” she says as she makes eye contact with you, “you doing alright there, Horuss?”

You try to speak, but your throat is quite sore. “I am fine,” you croak, “just a little hoarse.” Jane rolls her eyes but smiles fondly down at you. Her hands on you feel so nice and relaxing you don’t really think to freak out that you’re getting pacified by an alien whose nook you have tasted.

Dirk and Jake are on your right, with Jake looking concerned enough for both of them and Dirk sitting behind a mask of inexpressiveness, he’s pretty obviously concerned as well. To your left Roxy sniffles, and that’s the first you notice of her. She’s sitting quite separate from the others, not touching anyone, curled in on herself almost completely and staring at you with red ringed eyes. Her lip quivers, still a mess of blue where she’d drawn your blood, a cut of her own the only highlight.

“I’m— I’m sorry, Horrus. I really don’t kn-know what came over me.” She sobs while she speaks, not quietly but definitely not her usual self. The cheer and positivity that you’d found so enjoyably grating before is terrifying in its absence. “I didn’t mean to— I didn’t want to hurt you like that.” You don’t know why the others aren’t holding her. Dirk is holding onto Jake, though it seems almost more for his own support than to comfort anyone else. Jane starts to reach towards Roxy, or you assume so as you feel one of her hands leave your horn, but she holds herself back in some way because no comforting hand settles on Roxy’s shoulder, no arm reaches around her to pull her into a hug. You don’t know why nobody is rushing to her aid. Are they afraid of her? Is Roxy afraid of herself? You lift yourself up cautiously, thinkpan still filled with cotton from passing out, and Roxy’s eyes jut open wider than you’ve ever seen them. She recoils back from you as you bring yourself to a sitting position right in front of her, firmly within her personal space.

You swallow down on a lot of competing voices inside you, voices that tell you no, voices that tell you it’s wrong, voices that tell you that you shouldn’t, voices that warn you to be careful. You ARE careful, careful as you bring your arms around her, careful as you touch her bare skin with yours, unrestrained by anything other than the determination that you will not break this beautiful thing.

You hug Roxy.

Her weight settles on you as she collapses forward in the embrace; you try to relax but focus mostly on keeping still. Wetness drips down your back, tears you know, clear alien tears. Of relief, of sadness, of guilt, you don’t know. You know her pain, fear of oneself, fear of what you could do if you ever forgot how powerful you truly are, but you can’t know how it eats her up inside, you can’t know whether her reaction to the fear is anything like your own. She makes noises, like she’s trying to speak but words fail her, like all language is drowned in her sorrow. She’s clearly as overwhelmed in the aftermath as you were in the moment. You still hate, your hate hasn’t gone anywhere, she’s still a vile little so and so, but she’s your vile little so and so and you’ll be damned if you’re going to let her destroy herself over this. It isn’t fair that you should finally find release only to imprison the one who freed you in the same cage of despair. It’s not pale, not really, but in truth your feeling for her are no longer purely caliginous either. Not red, for certain, though not not-red either. It’s a very confusing feeling. You’re starting to see why the humans choose to cram all their quadrants into a single noisy word.

“To paraphrase something I heard earlier, if it isn’t too forward of me, I’d like to show you how a troll pacifies his alien boyfriend.”

Roxy laughs and shoves against you amicably. “Girlfriend, alien girlfriend, you dork.”

**Author's Note:**

> Ahaha, this is probably going to be my hardest prompt to explain. Basically, I'd love to see Horuss + the alpha ot4, all in a big adorable romantic pile. I've seen this done with Cronus in Let The Morning Come Soon (mind the warnings, or with Gamzee (I can't recall who did this. maybe splickedylit? but it wasn't a full fic, just snippets, and I can't find it now).  
> I ship Horuss individually with each of the alphas. I know, WEIRD rarepairs, but if you go to horuss's tag on my blog, there are explanations for why I enjoy the ships. And the alphas, man, they make such a lovely polyship on their own (though if you'd rather use a subset of the alphas rather than all four, that's fine by me). And Horuss is so lonely and unhappy and has had some miserable impulses and/or luck on the romance front, I just want to see him being happy and getting loved on.
> 
> OH, this goes for all my prompts: I love deliciously explicit sexy content, and I love g-rated fluff. Anything goes, I'm easy to please. If you decide to take things in a sexy direction, I love love LOVE mixing in big emotions/being overwhelmed (in the good way) with bdsm and kink themes (I have a special affection for aftercare, and top drop), and just about anything goes as far as the sex stuff.
> 
> \---------------
> 
> This fic will have five chapters:
> 
> 1\. Horuss/Dirk  
> 2\. Horuss/Jane  
> 3\. Horuss/Jake  
> 4\. You know it's coming  
> 5\. Sexy fun times


End file.
